Modifying file access time upon exec...

[Ken Smith]

On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 11:12 -0500, Sergey Babkin wrote:
> >No, I'm saying that there are filesystems you wouldn't want to mount
> >with noatime (/tmp, /var/tmp, /var/mail, /var/spool/*) because some
> >software depends on the atime being adjusted.
> >
> >But atime over NFS is something you'd usually want to turn off, because
> >it can really hurt performance.
> 
> As a compromise, would it make sense to make the
> atime granularity adjustable? I.e. instead of the 
> default microsecond granularity use a 1-second 
> granularity. Or a 10-second granularity, so that the 
> atime would be adjusted only once per every 10 
> seconds. And similarly for mtime, though here
> you should obviously be more careful.

I'm still a tiny bit confused but that's probably just me.  Normally
when setting up an environment with diskless clients in it I set things
up so that the portions of the server containing executable files are
mounted read-only on all the clients.  I typically can't trust the
client machines enough to grant them write access to something
like /usr.  So, in that sort of an environment this is a non-issue.  As
mentioned above there are portions of the environment you can't do that
for but none of those directories mentioned above would contain
executable files.  And the places that do contain executable files
(e.g. /usr) are mounted read-only.  So there should be no noticable
impact from the proposed patch if that sort of setup is normal.

Am I way off base?

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |